A critical tool for Virginia residents

We’ve done some great work to help ensure folks have their medical information available in an emergency (hopefully you’ve already filled out eprep profiles for you and your family). However, there are times when that information isn’t enough — if you become incapacitated and unable to manage your own care, it’s critical that folks know how you wish to be treated.

It isn’t a “fun” topic … but a critically important one. A number of states enable you to register these documents so there is no confusion when a crisis occurs. Virginia has gone a step further, and enabled you not only to manage your documents electronically, but also easily store copies in your HealthVault record to use with providers or others within or outside of Virginia.

Signing up for the service is easy — just visit the registry site at https://www.virginiaregistry.org and provide some basic information. Right there on the registration page, you can opt to link your registry account with HealthVault:

The registry can store any document, including but not limited to powers of attorney, advanced care directives, declarations of anatomical gift, and so on. It also provides templates for various document types to make it easier to get started.

This project was originally kicked off by Aneesh Chopra when he was with the Commonwealth, before starting his role as the first US CTO. So great to see this come fully online — another example of HealthVault becoming ubiquitous, one step at a time.